First, let me say that I love the books, and I loved the LotR movies. I did not enjoy Part 1 The HOBBIT. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but…
And my complaints about the first movie are NOT nit-picking details, nor disliking the additions from the LotR appendices. My complaints are much more serious:
(1) It’s boring. It’s battle after battle after battle, and that just gets tedious. Halfway through, I was looking at my watch to see how much more I had to put up with.
(2) It’s not about Bilbo, the Hobbit. It’s about… well, I don’t know, I guess it’s about battles with orcs (plus one battle with trolls). Bilbo’s role is pretty much incidental. (In the book, we see everything through the eyes of the hobbit; in the movie, we don’t.)
I’m hoping that the second movie will be better, but I think that the first movie needs about 20 minutes clipped out, rather than an extended edition. Three movies is too much. Two would have been better, and would have required PJ to do more careful editing.
Just for the record, I can’t find a single dictionary, including any of my print ones, that does not include some variant of “really, really big” among its definitions for the word “enormity.” Given this and common usage, I conclude the both are perfectly valid (and thus Bilbo’s use of the word is double appropriate).
No one’s arguing that the Mirkwood elves were “nice”; both the Mirkwood elves and Thorin’s crew are essentially good folk who could have stood to react to each other with less distrust and suspicion. The Dwarves, despite being warned not to wander, got themselves lost and repeatedly crashed the gatherings of a people already on edge, and then got surly when Thranduil wanted to know why they were wandering his woods without leave and getting the giant, blood-sucking spiders riled up. For his part, Thranduil could have taken a gentler approach and rolled out the food and drink prior to asking questions, as the only actual damage Thorin & Co. had managed to cause at that point was to themselves, and they were clearly lost – their presence was obviously a matter of their being incompetent at forestry rather than malicious. Both leaders have responsibilities to the people under their care, both groups have reasons they can trot out for acting churlish, and neither comes out looking great.
But adding in a chase scene where the elves are (possibly) using lethal force to halt the dwarven escape takes the situation from Thranduil being that guy who inconvenienced the protagonists to the guy who gave orders to kill them. It’s not a matter of “nice” vs “mean”, it’s a matter of “antagonist” vs “villain”.
(3) Interminably long, cartoonish sequences of dwarves in peril. I don’t mind the walking tour of Middle Earth, but I was feeling the length on both the rock giant fight and the dash from Goblin Town.
Yes. Dwarves and elves were NOT friendly in the slightest. Elves were a lot more complex than we were allowed to see in LOTR. I’m no PJ hater (Philippa Whatshername, a bit–solely because she comes across in her interviews as some WunderKind and some of the dialogue in LOTR is clunky as hell. “Do you remember the night we first met?” is straight out of a Gidget movie!, anyway, I digress). I enjoy LOTR (I tend to skip the battle scenes* and IMO what they did to the Ents was criminal), especially the costuming and locations and set design. They nailed ME, IMO, in that way.
I’m not impressed with The Hobbit, and most likely won’t bother seeing it’s remaining parts in the theater. It was my favorite of all the Tolkien books and is hurt the most by removing the childlike wonder/fairy tale aspects of it. It’s a child’s adventure story, written for 9 year olds (who had higher reading comprehension skills back in Tolkien’s day). It doesn’t translate well into blockbuster stuff. Still, given the quality of films out there, it’s probably one of the better ones around. <damns with faint praise>
*yes, they were well done, but for me, if you’ve seen one battle, you’ve seen 'em all. And then Ents are so wonderful and they were so very, very boring on screen… <shakes head>
This thread has been surprisingly very enlightening and I think I now see the difference in the two camps of thought.
One group (myself included) seems to like the adjectives in Tolkein’s work - the descriptions and color and mood and environment of all things Middle Earth.
The other group is very much a fan of Tolkein’s verbs - get to the story and follow the plot and stop wandering off the direct path of action.
I just think the journey is far more wonderful than just getting to the end, and I am more than happy to stop and smell the proverbial roses along the way - even if it extends the film(s) by hours and hours and hours.
Missed the edit window, but I’m thinking this is where the “nice elves” thing came from? That would be me getting wording wrong – in the book the line is “reasonably well-behaved” (as in the “even toward their worst enemies”), rather than “treated the dwarves decently”, which yes, would have a different connotation.
He’s the son of the King of the Woodelves, and is hundreds of years old.
He probably would have been there when the dwarves were captured, the elves didn’t travel much from Mirkwood.
Right, I guess. If that’s his background. But I mean, he’s not a character in the Hobbit, right? He doesn’t have any plot dedicated to him. Are they just going to have him stand in the background Or is this part of the padding they did to make three movies out of a pretty short book?
He’s not mentioned by name in The Hobbit, but it would kind of weird to exclude the son of the King.
And since we know that character, not having him interact a bit would be weird. Adding Tauriel is a stretch I’m not going to make.
Yeah, any Tolkien fan would have told you that Legolas was probably present in The Hobbit, even though he wasn’t mentioned by name. Combine that with the popularity of Orlando Bloom’s depiction of the character, and it’s kind of a no-brainer to include him in the Hobbit movie.
I wonder how they’ll portray him. He learned to like dwarves after his Gimli bromance, it would be interesting if he was more of a fantasy-racist here. But he’ll probably be heroic, and inspire more slash fiction.
I just don’t think that it feels much like Middle Earth in either verb or adjective when elves surfboard on shields, sons of kings say “Let’s hunt some orc” and ghosts swarm across Minas Tirith like luminescent green scrubbing bubbles.
Am I concerned with verbs? Absolutely. When PJ adds something that is superfluous, like Aragorn going over a cliff, I am annoyed. Am I concerned with adjectives? Yes, certainly. Which is why Radagast is so absurd. I am also concerned with nouns. I would have liked to see more of the things that were cut - the Houses of Healing scene that was added for extended RotK is something I very much wanted to see. Of course, it’s also an incredibly weak, poorly done scene, inserted at the wrong time in the film (it makes it seem like Pippin is wandering around the wreck of the Pellenor fields for DAYS while he looks for Merry. Couldn’t he have found him FIRST and THEN we could have had the Houses of Healing scene?)
Is this purism, or is this wanting Middle Earth to feel like Middle Earth, and not like some world that was made up by PJ, Fran and Phillippa (I agree with eleanorigby, she seems to be behind many of the changes I like the least) that happens to share some names and some events with Middle Earth, without having the same feelings, emotions or even themes in many cases.
I enjoy the LotR movies, I think, because of the labor of love that so many people who clearly DID care about this stuff put in, and in spite of, rather than because of, PJ and his team of writers.
Trouble is, what feels right to you might not feel right to me. Every reader has his own personal “feel” and vision and interpretation. No movie can ever get it right for everyone. In fact, no movie can ever get it right for anyone other than the movie-maker himself!
This has been a problem ever since the first illustrations of LOTR were published. Do you like the Hildrebrandt interpretations? Many do…and many don’t. How “fantastic” should the fantasy illustrations and interpretations be? Should people wear authentic medieval-type costume, or exaggerated “fantasy” costume with lots of extra flourishes? Which is the right “feel?”
I think this is a false dichotomy. I love the “descriptions and color and mood and environment” and I don’t mind “wandering off the direct path of action.” My problem with the first movie is neither the lushness of New Zealand, nor the addition of extra material. My problem is that the total result is boring. You say that you don’t mind stopping to smell the roses, but the fact is that if the movie had half an hour of roses, you’d almost certainly be bored.
No, I understand, it would certainly be possible to see a nature film about roses that was NOT boring. But you’d need to show different roses, different color, different angles. Similarly, it would have been possible for the first Hobbit movie to not be so dreadfully repetitive, but Peter Jackson didn’t do any of the things that might have improved/saved the movie (IMHO.)
The movies may be padded in certain senses, but not to create length.
The Lord of the Rings adaptation had to savagely abridge the three volumes of that novel to fit into only three movies. It makes sense that a fuller treatment of the single book of The Hobbit would take two; weave in the supplementary and bridging material, and a three-film production is quite reasonable.
Jackson’s version may have many faults, but for simple length the present trilogy is getting it more right than the previous production.
Couldn’t agree with you less, though that’s just MHO. Jackson’s Middle-Earth has occasional brief longeurs but it’s still Middle-Earth to me.
I tend to take the same attitude to his movies that I do to the post-trilogy works in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Earthsea”: basically, that these works are genuine ancient archival material from a long-cherished fantasy world, but some parts of them have been redacted by anonymous well-intentioned but ill-informed and biased editors who did not know or understand it as well as I do.
(And yes, I know that in LeGuin’s case it’s the original author herself that I’m putting in that category. I don’t care. It’s not about any principle of privileging authorial intention, it’s about my own subjective feeling for what is “right” and “true” in this alternate world.)
So when I watch or read these later works and see something that rings false to me, I just roll my eyes and think “silly meddling redactors”. And when I see something that rings true to me, even though I don’t recognize it as part of my accepted previously-attested authoritative canon, I think “Yes! They got that part right! That is EXACTLY how it really happened! I can’t believe I never realized that before!”
And that there is some powerful brain hooch. I don’t really care if Jackson throws some things into his movies that I think are silly and false. The point is that he’s shown me enough things that I was able to accept as new but true facts about Middle-Earth that I’m willing to sit through quite a bit of botched reporting for the chance of finding some more of those new but true facts.
(I think I’ve mentioned a while ago in this forum that one of those new but true facts from Hobbit I is the idiosyncracies of Dwarvish beard braiding. That obviously is EXACTLY what Dwarvish beards look like, and I can’t believe I never realized it before.)
